RMI is a set of protocols developed by Sun Microsystems, Inc. of Palo Alto, Calif. which enable JAVA objects (based on the JAVA programming language developed by Sun Microsystems, Inc.) to communicate remotely. The use of RMI allows for distributed computing in which the processing being performed by an application may be divided between a client and one or more servers. The RMI services being invoked are managed by an RMI activation system daemon such as RMID or Phoenix. RMID is the RMI activation system daemon from Sun Microsystems, Inc. (started by the ‘rmid’ command) that allows objects to be registered and activated in a JAVA Virtual Machine (JVM). Phoenix is a distributed network framework developed by Intel Corporation of Santa Clara, Calif. that is backwards compatible with RMID and may be used to support the RMI service framework discussed herein. The RMI activation system daemon provides persistence to the RMI services by managing the process in which the RMI service runs. In the event of session failure, the RMI activation system daemon is able to reinitiate the RMI service to limit any interruption in service being provided to the client.
Unfortunately, the RMI activation system daemon uses a number of mechanisms which are JAVA-based. While this allows the RMI services being managed by the RMI activation system daemon to communicate with each other using well-understood JAVA mechanisms, the use of the JAVA mechanisms presents a problem in integration with non-JAVA applications. Conventionally, there is not an available mechanism by which non-JAVA applications may be integrated into a service framework such that it can be managed by the RMI activation system daemon.